E-Commerce SEO Techniques

E-commerce is growing even in an otherwise sluggish economy where the retail sector is barely growing. To take advantage of this opportunity, both traditional retailers and virtual retailers are focusing on the web in a big way. The challenge for E-commerce sites is to get noticed by the search engines. This is where SEO comes into the picture. While it is tough to get your E-commerce website to rank at the top of search engine search results as they usually contain a lot of product pages with not-so-extraordinary content, you can take certain steps to improve your E-commerce website vis-à-vis that of the opposition.

Duplicate content is a huge problem in the world of SEO. Google is vigilant about returning relevant results when users search for anything. To that end, Google is punishing sites that contain duplicate content. Use rel=canonical tag to solve the problem of duplicate content on E-commerce sites. With the Google Panda update, Google seeks to deprecate sites with low quality content. So, you need to have original and fresh content on your site and on the site’s blog too. What you can do in this respect is have user reviews of products.

Keyword-stuffing can result in Google penalizing your site. So, resist the urge to mechanically include keywords everywhere from Meta title, Meta description, image alt tag and so on. Keyword density has very little role in today’s SEO. Make sure to write for people rather than search engines. With Google Penguin, Google seeks to punish websites that adopt black-hat SEO techniques such as increasing the number of links pointing to a page by buying links from link building farms. Refrain from having manipulative backlinks. Some legitimate link-building techniques include: linking to pages on the same website and diversifying anchor text.

Use of smartphones is skyrocketing. These smartphones could be senior executives and decision makers at corporate who are using their smartphones for a quick search during their commute. In fact, not only the corner office types but also ordinary commuters in their cars use the small screens to browse products and often to make purchase decisions too. The way to implement SEO to harness this user base is to have a mobile-friendly version of your website which gives importance to simple design, a light and fast-loading website, click-to-call features, user reviews of products, etc. The mobile website should have a simple checkout process and payment gateway with multiple payment and shipping options.

Social Media plays a growing role in the search ranking of your E-commerce website. Your website should be integrated with Social Media such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. Users should be able to share your website’s pages or the content on your blog. The more popular your site and blog are on Social Media, the better it looks to search engines. There are tools available such as Google Analytics which help you keep track of data about your site’s pages. You should keep a close watch over page views, time spent on a page, bounce rate, etc.

If you keep these basic techniques in mind, your E-commerce site should do fine. In later posts, we’ll look at specific e-commerce platforms such as Magento and what are the top SEO techniques for those particular platforms. If you have any questions or need any guidance with your E-commerce marketing strategy then please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital.